Recently, with the rapid spread of the Internet all over the world, various types of electronic commerce targeted at people throughout the world have been conducted through a homogeneous medium called the Internet. Also, communications in various forms have been conducted through the Internet.
In addition to electronic mail and file transmission, which are the most basic communication forms using the Internet, Internet telephony has been used as a substitution for wired telephony. Also, with the use of the Internet, a short message can be transmitted to a mobile telephone, and a variety of chatting types including character chatting, voice chatting, and video chatting, which are multilateral communications, have been conducted. Moreover, communities in which a plurality of users can exchange data, opinions, and the like have been activated.
Various forms of communities such as cafes, blogs, homepages, clubs, and mini-homepages exist, each of which includes various contents. Generally, users who have subscribed as members in a café or club communicate with each other by putting contents such as data or information about a certain subject on a bulletin board of the café or club. In the case of a blog, mini-homepage, and the like, the user who has established it posts his/her opinions or data.
Conventionally, it has been troublesome for a user to see or access desired contents contained in such communities, in that the user must access the communities directly and search for the contents. However, by virtue of recent developments of search technology, a query word can be inputted on a web browser, and information of a variety of forms, including web documents, news, images, and online dictionaries are searched for the query word. In addition, subject matters and user entries in online communities such as messageboards, café s, blogs, and the like can be included in the search. Thus, the user can easily search for the contents contained in the communities without separately accessing the communities and can easily find communities containing subject matters related to the query word.
However, there are a great number of contents not containing information worthy of reference among searched contents. Particularly, communities have a lot of undesired contents. For example, in some communities, users can post statements reflecting their thinking, feeling, or the like, in the form of a “reply” to the posted contents. Even when such posted contents do not contain information worthy of reference they may be searched and provided in the search results. In a case where contents in categories such as web documents, news, and the like, in addition to a community category, are searched, there are many cases where unnecessary information is contained in the contents of the searched web documents and in the search results provided to the user.
Further, typically when communities are searched for subject matters containing a query word, search results are arranged based only on scales such as the number of members and the number of posts of the searched communities.
In this way, conventionally, search results include all results containing the query word regardless of the reliability of the information included in the contents. Therefore, the conventional contents search method has a disadvantage in that there is a high possibility that unnecessary contents are searched and unreliable search results are provided to users. Accordingly, it is very difficult for a user to find reliable contents related to his query word amongst the numerous unreliable search results provided.